I was an Army brat, so every few years while I was a kid, we moved. That meant a new neighborhood (sometimes in a new country!) and a new school. Out of necessity, I learned to make friends quickly, because if you didn’t put yourself out there, you’d get pretty lonely. The other kids already had plenty of friends and didn’t have much motivation to seek me out.

The most effective technique was to hang out where I thought the other kids would eventually be – places like the playground or the ballfield or the corner store. Sure enough, someone would show up, we’d start up a conversation and I’d at least have one new acquaintance that might develop into a friend.

Even if we didn’t bond much, they would introduce me to their siblings and others in the neighborhood. Just being in their presence increased my approachability.

Another technique was to pay attention to which other houses on the block contained kids around my age. When I got bored enough, I’d summon up my courage, go knock on the door and ask whoever answered if they (or their boy or girl) could come out to play. Even if they could not play right then and there, I was often invited in and introduced. Sometimes it resulted in a whole family full of new friends. Other times, it opened the door for them to talk to me at school or even come to knock at my house.

This is the way I like to think of social websites. With search, we are waiting for people to come find us. However, like the established kids in a neighborhood, they probably have plenty of friends and little motivation to seek us out. They may not even know we exist, which makes it even tougher.

Some social websites, like Facebook, allow us to go hang out where the people are and strike up relationships. We may also gain new relationships through that initial tier of contacts. We become approachable to others and, before you know it, we have a great social circle. People who were never even looking for us have now discovered us because we’ve gone to where they are.

Other sites, like Linked In, provide more of a can you come out and play environment. You need to put yourself out there a little, asking for introductions and recommendations, but the rewards can be well worth it.

So, if you’re having a hard time embracing social websites, don’t give up just yet. Go where the people you want to have relationships with already are and allow yourself to be discovered. The key is finding the right places to go-the places where the people you want to interact with are already hanging out.

Adding this layer of discovery to your search marketing can reap unforeseen rewards for you and your online business.

upper photo from Easternblot

lower photo from Moody75

Take your own personalized search a step further and join a search experiment at Google Labs. If you take part in a one of their tests, you’ll see that feature when you search in Google.

At the present time, you may join in:

Alternate Views of the results of your queries, such as within the context of location (maps) and time (timelines) or in normal list view.

Keyboard Shortcuts allows you to perform search functions using shortcuts. This minimizes use of the mouse - great for power users.

Google Suggest, where Google gives you alternative suggestions for the keywords for which you are searching as you type them into the search box.

Today I was lucky enough to track down TJ Mahoney, the co-founder and CEO of Flipkey.com. I’ve talked about FlipKey a few times here - and I’m really excited to bring you some insight into how FlipKey works, who it’s for and how our clients and your guests can benefit from it’s Reputation Management platform.

The general premise is to allow guests to review individual vacation rentals and for shoppers to see reviews on those individual rentals. Until now, there really wasn’t a way for a potential guest to see reviews dedicated to the EXACT rental they’re looking at. Other sites that allow reviews aren’t really guaranteeing any aspect of the rental you’re looking at. Flipkey.com has a unique way of letting shoppers and reviewers know that the rental is part of their FlipKey Verified Program, which means they guarantee on-site property management and hospitality services.

I asked TJ some questions about the process and the product - here are his answers. Please feel free to leave your questions in the comment box below and I’ll see if I can get TJ back to answer your questions.

(more…)

How many of you have web-friendly phones? I do now, just got a Blackberry - and I’m officially addicted and now know why they call them “crackberries.”

I find it interesting to see what sites will render well on my small screen, and which ones are horrendous and slow loading.

The age is coming, my friends, when having your hotel, resort, or even vacation rental company available from a mobile searcher will be key to gaining market share. Beyond “booking” on the phone - which may take more time to implement and make small-screen friendly - offering information that someone traveling TO your doorstep might need is a great way to start down the “mobile website” road.

Building a Mobile-Friendly Site

There are things to be said for building your website in a way that it will “automatically” render on a small screen. This is ideal, and can be done - at a cost - it’s not cheap and sometimes can be cost prohibitive. If you’re not ready to completely redesign and reprogram your site, there are things you can do to move into the mobile age, without breaking the bank.

We have A Solution for you!

Blizzard is nearly finished setting up plan for our clients that offers a “mobile-browser-friendly” subdomain with redirects on your site that will send mobile-searchers to that subdomain when their mobile browser is detected. When a mobile phone user types in your URL - they will be automatically redirected to http://m.domain.com - a subdomain on the client’s website that is mboile phone friendly.

There are certain restrictions - some phones are really not “made” to display the mobile web. Also the file that supports the redirect into the mobile subdomain can only handle “so many” browser types - and every phone works a bit differently. Right now I think we’re running about 25 different redirects in our test cases - which should cover a majority of internet-friendly phones. You can accommodate those mobile searchers who DON’T have one of those 25 or so phones - you might place a link on your main site to your mobile friendly sub-domain. Let users browse to it or let them send a SMS message with the mobile domain to their phone.

What about iPhone?

The iPhone contains a technology called “TruWeb” which allows you to see full websites within the screen. With the mobile re-directs in place, the iPhone will show your regular website, not your scaled-down mobile subdomain. By moving into the mobile “sphere” in this manner, you’re providing mobile-firiendly content to the newest technologies and some that arent so new. Not everyone will have or invest in an iPhone, so making sure you’re catering to as much market share as you can is critical.

Interested?

If you’re interested in having a mobile-friendly subdomain added to your site - send an email to info@blizzardinternet.com or contact your account or project manager and be one of the first to get in on this new and cutting-edge technology.

Texting image from Nesster

Social Media sites like Facebook, Myspace, and Twitter have long been thought of by businesses as places for teenagers and geeks. That may have been true two or three years ago but now these sites have become places for adults. The appeal of these social networking to reconnecting with old friends, have your own “place” online, and have the ability to find new and interesting people and events makes social networking even more appealing. I have reconnected with a number of friends from high school and college, and use the space to post photos, and keep people updated with what I am doing. From a marketing perspective, these sites offer so much more. Facebook in particular has some nice features any online businesses can take advantage of.

While adults are getting onto these sites at an ever increasing rate, especially well informed and educated adults, teenagers still the majority. For the hospitality industry, this is a unique chance to target a very influential demographic. While teens are not usually the ones who make the final decision on vacation plans , they offer a huge amount of influence over the decision making in most every family. Forgetting to bring a lodging property to the attention of these voices can be a huge mistake. Imagine that sulky teenage girl on your next family vacation - completely irritated because you’re staying at a resort full of “old people.” Instead of trying to entice a younger demographic to your site through typical marketing techniques, why not attempt to draw them to your site by engaging them where they already are. A Facebook business page is a great way to bring your business to them.

Facebook business pages offer a number of built in functions that can help you realize your goals:

• Brand your page by placing your logo at the top of the page
• Entice the teenager by emphasizing things they’re interested in like “free wifi” and “pool scene.”
• Supply basic business information like website address and physical location.
• Very easy to upload photos and your clients can upload photos as well
• Engage your clients in a conversation using the discussion board or “The Wall”
• Post events that are happening on your property as well as the area
• Add notes, which act just like blog post or you can link your blog to the site easily
• Uploading videos could not be easier. The quality and speed of playback on videos is very impressive
• Most important is other users can become fans of your company

These tools, when used effectively can engage your audience and give them a chance to learn more about your location as well as your business in general. Give them a place to ask you questions about your property and a way to let easily people know that they really liked staying with you.

Facebook has made it even easier to promote your page by placing a recognizable image link on your main website. This may drive traffic to your Facebook page but you still are able to control the message and attract bookings on your site.

Your Facebook page:

• Lets teens know that you care about their ability to influence their parents’ decision.
• Gives everyone another place to find your property, while still linking back to your site.
• Gives you one more opportunity to win over potential clients by showing them more about your area in order to make an informed vacation decision.

By quickly searching Facebook I found resorts with over 200 fans quite easily. There are not that many resorts, hotels, or vacation rentals listed on Facebook, yet. You’re going to change that! Building a Facebook profile now is a great way to get in on the bottom floor and start attracting those customers who are looking for places to stay that are willing come to their online neighborhood to engage and appeal to their vacation whims.

For an example of a Facebook business page please look at our new Blizzard Internet Marketing page on Facebook. For an Example of a personal Facebook page visit Trent Blizzard’s profile (you will have to sign up to see Trent’s profile but our business page anyone can see). If you do sign up feel free to become a fan of Blizzard. You may even find and Account Manager or another employee that you know and want to add as a friend.

I’m declaring today “Try Another Search Engine Day” at Blizzard. I’m trying to get my coworkers to cut the cord between themselves and Google and try out Ask.com.

Besides the really cool start pages, the content and layout is really nice. A recent Comscore report showed that Ask.com grew faster than Google, MSN or Yahoo in January 2008 - when compared with the prior month.

So why is Ask getting popular? That’s a hard question but my guesses are:

Ask has a great interface - and people are starting to notice it? (that’s a stretch probably)

People are afraid of BigBrother Google and are looking for an alternative?: (possibly but probably not)

Ask pays them? (okay no, that’s not it)

Some reasons from Ross Dunn at Stepforth ( I found this via MarketingPilgrim - so thanks to the Pilgrims)

• The shun the nofollow tag and pass some juice!
• Local businesses can submit their business manually to Ask’s local portal AskCity. If you’re not included and want to be, you have to send an email request.
• Ask owns blog reader Bloglines and they rank blogs partly based on their popularity on Bloglines.

I encourage everyone to give their search engine a try. They’ve really embraced universal search results and you’re going to find a ton of neat stuff for your queries. The result below is a query I did for “Best Snow in Idaho”

Video is the new mobile - in a sense.  Three or four years ago, the thought of surfing the web on your phone was a bit foreign to most of us, today it’s second nature - even for those of us with horrible phones that don’t surf well.

So in the door walks the new darling child of the online marketing world - (it’s really an infant) and an excellent opportunity to take advantage of SEO on your travel website.  Most of you already HAVE videos on your site, you just may not know it.  Virtual Tours are basically videos of your hotel, property, rooms, restaurants, etc.   There are ways to convert or build virtual tours in formats that allow easy uploading to video search engines, and easy embedding on individual pages of your site….you see where I’m going with this, right?

 Each page on your site that features a video should have a few things to make the subject matter of that video rank well -

1. Search engines can’t index video - yet - so you need to wrap some excellent descriptive text around your video on the page to make sure search engines know what you’re offering.  An easy way to do this it to create a written transcript of what you have to offer and place it on the page with the video.
2. Use closed captioning when possible.  Some format allow text files that are transcripts to be attached to the video, if you can do this - take advantage of it
3. Give the video a descriptive keyword rich file name.  Try “northshorevacationmovie.wmv” vs. “movie.wmv”
4. Optimize the text on the page - add relevant and unique page titles, meta description, h tags, inbound link text, etc.
5. Link to that page with good keyword-rich text.

Search engines will not index your video on your site - they don’t have the technology to make that happen.  You MUST upload those videos to a video sharing site such as YouTube, Ifilm or MetaCafe to have them included in the Google or Yahoo indexes and showing as results.  If you do this correctly, you could potentially capture a good listing in the regular web results or in Video results.

 Converting and File Types

There are some technical and logistical issues you need to consider if you want to convert a virtual tour into a video.  Some come ready to upload to the video search engines, in .mov format - others do not.  Ask your virtual tour provider for a copy of the tour in a supported format.  Every engine is different but YouTube for example supports .wmv, .avi, .mov and .mpg. 

Make sure you OWN your videos.  Some third-party companies will not let you have a copy of your video or virtual tour for use in promoting your business - this is limiting and you should be able to negotiate a copy in the correct format when you sign the contract to have the work done.  Make sure you read the video fine print - are they going to add in ads or graphics that don’t support your brand?  Yellow Pages videos add a graphic to the corner of every video they make, this forces the viewer on YouTube to find you in the yellow pages, not directly on your own website - and the potential for a lost sale increases.  Investing in video is expensive - so make sure you can get the most out of your investment.

 For more information on optimizing the images and videos on your website, check out Blizzard’s Free Markting Whitepapers and particularly the whitepaper on SEO: Images and Videos.